Are Google and Facebook really prepared to pull services from their Australian users rather than hand over some money to publishers under the bargaining code?
Executives from Google and Facebook have told a Senate committee they are prepared to take drastic action if Australia’s news media bargaining code, which would force the internet giants to pay news publishers for linking to their sites, comes into force.
Google would have “no real choice” but to cut Australian users off entirely from its flagship search engine, the company’s Australian managing director Mel Silva told the committee. Facebook representatives in turn said they would remove links to news articles from the newsfeed of Australian users if the code came into effect as it currently stands.
In response, the Australian government shows no sign of backing down, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg bothsaying they won’t respond to threats.
So what’s going on here? Are Google and Facebook really prepared to pull services from their Australian users rather than hand over some money to publishers under the bargaining code?
Facebook claims news is of little real value to its business. It doesn’t make money from news directly, and claims that for an average Australian user less than 5% of their newsfeed is made up of links to Australian news.
But this is hard to square with other information. In 2020, the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report found some 52% of Australians get news via social media, and the number is growing. Facebook also boasts of its investments in news via deals with publishers and new products such as Facebook News.
Google likewise says it makes little money from news, while at the same time investing heavily in news products like News Showcase.
So while links to news may not be direct advertising money-spinners for Facebook or Google, both see the presence of news as an important aspect of audience engagement with their products.
On their own terms
While both companies are prepared to give some money to news publishers, they want to make deals on their own terms. But Google and Facebook are two of the largest and most profitable companies in history – and each holds far more bargaining power than any news publisher. The news media bargaining code sets out to undo this imbalance.
What’s more, Google and Facebook don’t appear to want to accept the unique social role of news, and public interest journalism in particular. Nor do they recognise they might be involved somehow in the decline of the news business over the past decade or two, instead pointing the finger at impersonal shifts in advertising technology.
The media bargaining code being introduced is far too systematic for them to want to accept it. They would rather pick and choose commercial agreements with “genuine commercial consideration”, and not be bound by a one-size-fits-all set of arbitration rules.
Google and Facebook dominate web search and social media, respectively, in ways that echo the great US monopolies of the past: rail in the 19th century, then oil and later telecommunications in the 20th. All these industries became fundamental forms of capitalist infrastructure for economic and social development. And all these monopolies required legislation to break them up in the public interest.
It’s unsurprising that the giant ad-tech media platforms don’t want to follow the rules, but they must acknowledge that their great wealth and power come with a moral responsibility to society. Making them face up to that responsibility will require government intervention.
Online pioneers Vint Cerf (now VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google) and Tim Berners-Lee (“inventor of the World Wide Web”) have also made submissions to the Senate committee advocating on behalf of the corporations. They made high-minded claims that the code will break the “free and open” internet.
But today’s internet is hardly free and open: for most users “the internet” is huge corporate platforms like Google and Facebook. And those corporations don’t want Australian senators interfering with their business model.
Independent senator Rex Patrick hit the nail on the head when he asked why Google wouldn’t admit the fundamental issue was about revenue, rather than technical detail or questions of principle.
How seriously should we take threats to leave the Australian market?
Google and Facebook are prepared to go along with the Senate committee’s processes, so long as they can modify the arrangement. The don’t want to be seen as uncooperative.
The threat to leave (or as Facebook’s Simon Milner put it, the “explanation” of why they would be forced to do so) is their worst-case scenario. It seems likely they would risk losing significant numbers of users if they did so, or at least having them much less engaged – and hence producing less advertising revenue.
Google has already run small-scale experiments to test removing Australian news from search. This may be a demonstration that the threat to withdraw from Australia is serious, or at least, serious brinkmanship.
People know news is important, that it shapes their interactions with the world – and provides meaning and helps them navigate their lives. So who would Australians blame if Google and Facebook really do follow through? The government or the friendly tech giants they see every day? That’s harder to know.
For transparency, please note The Conversation has also made a submission to the Senate inquiry regarding the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code.
Paul Fletcher said Microsoft is at the ready to replace Google Search with Bing in Australia, while Treasury pointed to the existence of codes in the dairy and sugar industries as justification for pushing forward with the Media Bargaining Code.
Google last month threatened to pull its search engine from Australia if the Media Bargaining Code in its current form were to become law, but the prime minister and his army of ministers have said they are confident the likes of Microsoft could swoop in to fill the void if Google does in fact exit the market.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had spoken with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the opportunities for Bing in a Google-less Australia, and during his address to the National Press Club on Monday, the prime minister said Microsoft is pretty confident that Bing is a sufficient alternative.
Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts Paul Fletcher joined the Bing support team, telling ABC News 24 that in the event Google leaves, he expects to see investment from other players in the local market.
“We know that big tech companies make these threats from time to time, they don’t always follow through,” he said of Google’s potential departure.
“This is a potential commercial opportunity for other providers of search.”
Fletcher was asked if Bing was a sufficient alternative for Google.
“I don’t hold myself out to be somebody providing product ratings and clearly Google has a much bigger market share in the Australian market than Bing,” he said. “But what is clear by the meeting initiated by Microsoft … is they’re very significantly interested in the market opportunity in Australia should Google wish to withdraw its presence in Australia.
“There will be a strong market response.”
While Fletcher was hesitant to answer if Google would follow through on its threat, he did say companies operating in Australia needed to abide by Australian rules and regulations.
“Ultimately at the end of the day, if you want to do business in Australia, you need to comply with the laws of the sovereign government of Australia — that’s not a particularly radical proposition,” Fletcher continued.
“What we’ve seen in other areas where we’ve introduced laws that initially have been resisted by global technology businesses is that ultimately they have complied.”
With the Media Bargaining Code in December passing the lower house, the Bill is before a Senate Committee debating its future. The committee on Monday afternoon heard from Treasury’s Markets Group Deputy Secretary, Meghan Quinn.
She was asked if Treasury has looked at the implications of a Google-less Australia.
“We’ve looked at the possibility of the actions as stated by the parties, what the implications might be in a general sense, but exactly what they will do, more analysis is needed,” she said.
“It’s a little hard to think about worst case scenario — it depends a bit on what that looks like.”
Quinn and her fellow government representatives refused to answer if Bing or DuckDuckGo were sufficient alternatives to Google.
In justifying the decision to draft a code, Quinn pointed to other sectors that have competition law codes in place, such as in franchising, food and grocery, dairy, sugar, and horticulture.
“Many of the elements of the code before the committee are similar in intent to those found in these other codes … some include arbitration models,” she said.
“One of the interesting things is the actual provision of a code in itself changes the market dynamics, without the code necessarily being invoked.
“We’ve seen that for example in the sugar industry, the existence of the code and the existing of the elements of mandatory arbitration have actually driven commercial outcomes without the arbitration mechanisms being sparked.”
Treasury was asked about where the federal government spends its media and advertising budget, with ALP Senator Alex Gallacher arguing that the government has in fact been complicit in defunding traditional media organisations by moving to other methods of advertising.
“If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, are we trying to save the Titanic that’s sinking?” he asked.
Confusion ensued when Google continued to disagree with pending legislation that would force them to pay Australian publishers for the pleasure of showcasing their content in the SERPs, while simultaneously signing a deal to pay French publishers for their content.
However, when you look at the two agreements side by side, there is a clear difference.
The Story Behind the French Agreement
In 2020, French readers saw news results from European publishers pulled from the SERPs in response to a copyright law that was passed.
In October, Google announced that they were investing $1 billion over three years to pay publishers for content showcased on Google News Showcase.
The agreement with France allows Google to negotiate individual licenses whereby payment will be based on specific and measurable metrics. This includes Google paying on behalf of the reader for any content published behind paywalls, allowing users access to content they wouldn’t be able to see unless they made a payment.
Google and Facebook colluded to undermine competition in advertising, according to documents uncovered by the New York Times. Obtained during an antitrust lawsuit in Texas, the documents lift the lid on ‘Jedi Blue’ – a cloak and dagger sweetheart deal between two tech giants that monopolize online advertising.
So what’s the deal?
Google and Facebook are accused of abusing their market position to strike a backroom deal to further their business interests.
The agreement is said to have seen Facebook win more favorable terms when bidding for advertising in return for its support for Google’s Open Bidding platform for selling adverts over header bidding – where advertising space is auctioned across multiple ad exchanges.
Google has long agitated against this method of buying advertising, maintaining that it slows down web pages and causes batteries to drain faster, as well as elevating the risk for fraud and billing errors.
As a result, Facebook gained more time to bid for adverts and was able to strike direct billing deals with sites hosting the ads. The underhand arrangement is also said to have seen Google furnish its rival with its data to enable Facebook to better target audiences.
In a quid pro quo, Facebook consented to bid on a minimum of 90% of ad auctions when it could identify users, with a pledge to spend at least $500m a year.
Such terms handed Facebook an unfair advantage over Google’s other advertising partners according to the New York Times, which spoke with six of these to help build its case. This meant Facebook was almost guaranteed to win a consistent number of adverts.
Evidence of collusion was first obtained from documents filed as part of an antitrust complaint lodged by the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, amid suspicion the tech pair were getting too cozy.
This relationship even included a clause that committed both companies to ’cooperate and assist’ in the event of any investigation into their business practices.
Why it matters
Should apparent collusion be corroborated it would further undermine confidence in digital advertising – particularly if a guaranteed win rate is confirmed.
In response to the allegations, Google contends that its agreement has been misrepresented, while Facebook maintains that such deals serve to enhance competition.
Irrespective of the truth of the matter, the lack of transparency shown by both parties will do little to instill confidence in competitors or legislators.
Addressing the claims directly, Google director of economic policy Adam Cohen wrote: “Our agreement with Facebook Audience Network (FAN) simply enables them (and the advertisers they represent) to participate in Open Bidding.
“Of course we want FAN to participate because the whole goal of Open Bidding is to work with a range of ad networks and exchanges to increase demand for publishers’ ad space, which helps those publishers earn more revenue.
“AG Paxton inaccurately claims that we manipulate the Open Bidding auction in FAN’s favor. We absolutely don’t. FAN must make the highest bid to win a given impression. If another eligible network or exchange bids higher, they win the auction.
“FAN’s participation in Open Bidding doesn’t prevent Facebook from participating in header bidding or any other similar system. In fact, FAN participates in several similar auctions on rival platforms.”
Both Google and Facebook have been in the eye of an antitrust storm, with Google fending off multiple lawsuits from the Department of Justice and three dozen states centered on its near-monopoly of search and search advertising, as well non-search advertising.
Happy new year, readers! We’re back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure.
First up: Moz SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 21 tips for successful Google SEO in 2021, including what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead. He’s also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription below!
Watch and enjoy, and as always, leave your questions and your own suggestions in the comment section.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today, so glad that you can join us. We are talking about 21 smart Google SEO tips for 2021. We’re getting ready for a new year, a new year of SEO strategies. These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, move the needle on your organic traffic.
These are some of the best tips that I’ve collected over the past year. Many of them that I’m going to use myself in my own SEO strategies.
Now we have four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these. These are going to go fast. We’re trying to do 10 to 12 minutes, so we don’t get to spend a lot of time on each one. But don’t fret. We’re going to link to appropriate resources in the transcript below so that we can keep along and explore a little bit more. All right. Ready to dive in?
Increasing clicks
Let’s start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that’s one of the great things about SEO. You don’t actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let’s talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings.
1. Favicon optimization
First, favicon optimization.
Now I’m surprised more people haven’t talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they’re high contrast, if they’re visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that.
2. Breadcrumb optimization
While we’re optimizing our favicons, let’s take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page.
What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you’re using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn’t always necessary. So a great breadcrumb optimization audit.
3. Meta descriptions
Let’s optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don’t even use meta descriptions. Now that’s understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description, usually because it’s not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it’s encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website.
4. Numbers in titles
Along with meta descriptions, titles. Just shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand. Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021.
Don’t be spammy about it. Don’t include it if it doesn’t make sense and don’t fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query.
5. <Title> boilerplate
How about doing a boilerplate audit for your title tag? Tip number five. What’s boilerplate? Boilerplate are the parts of your title tag that repeat every single time.
For example, here at Moz, we put “Moz,” our brand name at the end of every title tag. We used to put “Whiteboard Friday” at the end of every Whiteboard Friday until we tested it and found out that we actually got more clicks and higher rankings when we removed it. So boilerplate, you want your titles to be unique, provide unique value. So I would encourage you to experiment with your boilerplate and see if removing it actually increases your rankings.
Tip number six: schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google gave us a huge gift when they introduced these in search results. FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate. You can’t always win it, and you can’t always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can definitely increase or influence people to click on your result, expand those FAQ schemas out.
It’s not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.
Content can go stale after a few years. So we launch content. You have a blog, you launch it, and you share it on social media. Most people forget about it after that. So go back, look at your top content over the last two to five years or even 10 years, if you want to go back that far, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL. In some cases, you can see gains of 500% to 1,000% just by relaunching some of your old content with some updates.
So do a relaunch audit in 2021.
8. Increase internal linking
Number eight: increasing internal linking. Now a lot of top SEO agencies, when they need to quickly increase rankings for clients, there are generally two things that they know are the easiest levers to pull. First, title tags and meta descriptions, what’s getting more clicks, but second is increasing the internal linking.
You know that you can increase internal links on your site, and there are probably some opportunities there that you just haven’t explored. So let’s talk about a couple easy ways to do that without having too much work.
9. Update old content with new links
Number nine is updating your old content with new links. This is a step that we see people skip time and time again. When you publish a new blog post, publish a new piece of content, make sure you’re going back and updating your old content with those new links.
So you’re looking at the top keyword that you want to rank for, and going in Google Search Console or checking tools like Keyword Explorer to see what other pages on your site rank for that keyword, and then adding links to the new content to those pages. I find when I do this, time and time again, it lowers the bounce rate. So you’re not only updating your old page with fresh content and fresh links and adding relevance. You’re adding links to your new content. So make sure, when you publish new content, you’re updating your old content with those new links.
10. Remove unnecessary links
Number 10, remove unnecessary links from your content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting. PageRank sculpting is a dirty word in SEO, but actually it works to a certain extent. It’s not nofollow link page sculpting.
It is removing unnecessary links. Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don’t. Sometimes you do. But if you remove the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a major Google ranking signal.
11. Mobile link parity audit
Number 11, need you to do a mobile link parity audit. What is that? What is a mobile link parity audit? That is ensuring that the links on your mobile site are the same as the links on your desktop site. Why is that important? Well, the last couple of years Google has moved to a mobile first index, meaning what they see on your mobile site, that’s your website.
That’s what counts. So a lot of sites, they have a desktop site, and then they reduce it to their mobile site and they’re missing links. They get rid of header navigation, footer links, and things like that. A recent study showed that the average desktop page has 61 links and the average mobile page has 54 links. That means on the web as a whole there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.
So do a study on your own website. Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you’re not losing that equity.
12. Invest in long-form content
Number 12: need you to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and time again, when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares.
It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential.
13. Use more headers
When you’re doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13: use more headers. I’m talking about H2 and H3 tags.
Break up your content with good, keyword-rich header tags. Why? Well, we have research from A.J. Ghergich that shows that the more header tags you have, generally you rank for more featured snippets. Sites with 12-13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.
So make sure you’re breaking up your content with header tags. It adds a little contextual relevance. It’s a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.
14. Leverage topic clusters
Number 14, leverage topic clusters. Don’t just launch one piece of content. Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link those together. When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different articles.
You can add the right contextual inner links. I have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below, where someone did this and produced amazing results. So look into topic clusters for 2021.
15. Bring content out of tabs
Finally, bring your content out of tabs. If you have content that is in accordions or drop-downs or you have to click to reveal the content, study after study after study shows that content that’s brought out of tabs and brought into the main body, so people don’t have to click to see, generally performs better than content that’s hidden in tabs.
Now to be clear, I don’t believe that Google discriminates content in tabs. They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine. But I think people generally engage with content when it’s out of tabs, and maybe some of those signals help those pages to rank a little better.
Technical SEO
All right. Just a very few technical SEO tips. We’re going fast.
16. Core Web Vitals
Number 16: this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. It’s going to be an actual ranking factor very soon. We’re talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say. Generally, we’re talking about site speed and delivering great page experience. Now some of these things are very technical, and Google has some tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help you to figure them out.
One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular their APO for WordPress. It’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website and help you score better for some of these Core Web Vitals. It’s very low cost, it’s easy to implement, and it’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website.
17. Limit sitemaps to 10,000
Number 17: sitemaps. Sitemaps, you’re allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap. This is always a question in every SEO quiz. How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed? Instead, if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs. You don’t have to use all 50,000.
We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability of those. It’s kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way. The data seems to support it. You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console. You can see what’s being indexed and what’s not.
18. Leverage dynamic sitemaps
Also, leverage dynamic sitemaps. Our friend Oliver Mason shows — that I’ll link to in the transcript below — that a dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl. So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority ones in their own special sitemap.
Maybe you limit it to one thousand URLs. As Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority URLs that you want Google to discover. Keep the sitemap small and tight, and let Google know that those are the ones that you want them to pay attention to.
Link building
Let’s quickly talk about link building tips for 2021, because everybody loves link building.
No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and there are some great people in the industry who do love it, who are great at it. Personally, I’m not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.
19. Passive link acquisition
One way that I’m able to do that is number 19: passive link acquisition. What passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.
It means I don’t have to outreach to people. It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally want to link to it. You do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators are looking for. These are generally data, guides, definitions, how to, such as this video. When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it. Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.
20. Page-level link intersect
Number 20, page-level link intersect. When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. Now we’ve known for a long time one of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors but not to you.
I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two of my competitors but not to me. That means that they are generally a resource page, if they’re linking to multiple competitors but not to me, and more likely to link to me if I ask them. We have a great tool here at Moz, Link Explorer, that does page-level link intersect. I think it’s the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I’m biased, because I actually use it.
21. Be the last click
Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click. What do I mean by that? I mean satisfy your users. Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click, but you also want to be the last click. That means they found what they are looking for. User satisfaction is ranking signal number one. Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.
That’s the magic of SEO. They’re searching for something, and you’re delivering it to them at the exact moment they search for it. When you can be the last click, you’re almost guaranteed to rise in rankings and get the traffic that you deserve.
All right, those are 21 tips. That’s your roadmap for 2021. Hope you enjoyed it. Please share this video and share your tips for 2021 in the comments below.
Cyrus Shepard is the founder of Zyppy, an SEO consulting and software company. He writes/tweets about Google ranking signals, SEO best practices, experiments, tactics, and industry updates.For the latest, follow Cyrus on Twitter, or check out more of his posts on Moz.
Over the years, Google hasn’t always been forthcoming about tweaks to its algorithm. But when it is, it usually causes a ripple of panic across the marketing world.
Google detailed two changes this year:
A new set of ranking signals – Core Web Vitals – to more accurately measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with web pages as part of its page experience update
The block of third-party cookies on the Chrome browser as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiatives
Will these decisions be destabilizing forces that send your search traffic spiralling out of your brand’s control?
Paxton Gray, CEO of marketing agency 97th Floor and 2020 Content Marketing World speaker, says no. In his view, these shifts are just a call to take a fresh look at the power of data.
Content marketers may think they need to appease Google’s algorithm to achieve success. But Paxton contends that there’s a more powerful way to view the search equation: Make Google work for you.
“The more personally resonant and deeply satisfying your content experiences are, the more motivated Google will be to serve them up for users to find and engage with,” he says.
In a recent conversation with CCO magazine, Paxton explains Google’s latest moves and outlines an approach to help you deliver the kinds of content experiences searchers want to click.
Google’s page experience update is a non-issue
Google will measure a set of three additional ranking signals (i.e., its Core Web Vitals) as part of its latest page experience update:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long it takes the biggest element or piece of content on your page to load. Google sets the standard at 2.5 seconds or less. If your website doesn’t load quickly, you could see a decrease in rankings.
Input delay – how long a site takes to respond to a visitor’s tap or click on an element. It needs to be less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative layout shift – the distance that buttons and links move as the website loads. Ideally, you want no movement, so users don’t click on a button but mistakenly get taken to a different destination because the button moved as other page features finished loading.
“If you’re already managing these elements of the website experience (and you should be), these updates won’t affect you too much,” says Paxton.
But some marketers think they need to respond to every single detail of Google’s updates, when they should be focusing on how to use Google to understand their customers better, overall.
“As marketers, all of our decisions should revolve around the experience our users have when engaging with our assets – from the first ad they see to the landing page, the call to action, the thank-you email, and to whatever else happens after they purchase and beyond. That should be the centre of our universe, not necessarily just optimizing content for leads and conversions, which is often where we end up focusing all of our attention,” he says.
“If you focus on the bigger picture of what your consumers want to experience when engaging with content found on search, the small things will usually take care of themselves.”
Focus, not tracking, is the problem
Audience research conducted through search won’t be affected much by the loss of cookies, Paxton says. But tracking your audience’s behaviours and personality characteristics at touchpoints of your content experience will get more challenging. Tools that use other methods to track those critical customer insights can be used to create correlations among those insights that deepen your understanding of who your customers really are.
Content marketers can realize a big competitive advantage in this area. But, Paxton says, a cognitive shift needs to happen:
Marketers commonly view consumers as markets – entities that match a particular persona or profile description – so that’s how they speak to them. But these are people with personal lives and life experiences that run far deeper than what their buying habits or consumption behaviours may reveal.
Your audience may be similar in ways that have nothing to do with their profession or the persona they most closely resemble. Paxton contends that if you use data to reveal what those similarities might be – like the kinds of bands they love or their favourite vacation destinations, for example – you can engage them in more personally resonant ways. “That’s how we cut through all of the noise and deliver the complete, desirable content experiences Google plans to favour,” he says.
3 ways to mine for more powerful insights
To reach this level of personal detail, Paxton recommends focusing on three research techniques: keyword research, social media monitoring, and semantic analysis. His approach focuses on the context of your audience’s inquiries – learning about how, not just what, they search.
Keyword research should already be a core component of your content strategy. The real trick is to go beyond targeting the most popular keywords and examine the larger behaviour patterns happening behind those searches (more on that in a minute).
Monitoring and analysing social media conversationsis another rich source of useful audience insights. Don’t look only for brand-related conversations but also for opportunities to deliver on your audiences’ needs and distinguish your content from that of your competitors, Paxton says.
Consider what fintech company Acorns has done. The company specializes in micro-investing, though it competes with companies like Betterment geared to bigger investments.
“If you break down the social media activities of their community members, you can find some key differences between the two groups,” says Paxton. “Betterment’s users are likely to follow Wall Street, big traders, and high-profile advisors like Jim Cramer … but the people on Acorns, they’re following Etsy. They follow WordPress, they follow YouTube creators – people with side hustles or those who are just starting their own small businesses and are looking for a different kind of financial advice.
“Acorns’ content isn’t going to be competitive against the high-finance topics Betterment can dominate, like estate tax laws or economic trend forecasts. But it can win with content geared toward side hustlers, small businesses, and micro-investors – such as how to hire your first employee or set up a shop on Etsy,” he says.
To get to this level of audience insight, look at your social and search data through a different lens – one that considers how they talk about those topics.
This leads us to the third technique: semantic analysis.
A big reason for Google’s page experience updates is to provide the most complete content possible so someone can search, click, and be done. Semantic analysis can bring you closer to this ideal by uncovering areas where your existing body of content may be incomplete – topics and considerations, related concepts, or core knowledge or areas of expertise.
Google’s algorithms know what subjects are associated with the keywords you already found. Paxton says you can take your keyword research to the next logical step by performing a TF-IDF analysis.
TF-IDF analysis is a process for identifying, analysing, and reverse-engineering the conditions that may cause Google to rank competing content higher than your content for your chosen keywords. It surfaces semantically related terms that your audience expects to see when researching a topic of interest. “Including those terms in the content you create around that subject will bring more weight and authority to your conversations – in the eyes of both Google and your audience,” Paxton says.
Paxton shares a personal example of the impact of this technique: “I’m about to go backpacking, and I’m looking for a jacket that provides the durability I need for my trip. As I sort through the top articles listed on my keyword search for ‘jackets for backpacking,’ I see the first one talks about the warmth of the jacket, but not its durability. So, I have to go back and sort through multiple results until I find one that talks about durability.
“If the first article had covered everything about the jacket that I care about, such as its materials, the climates and terrains it’s best suited for, etc., I would immediately have been more satisfied with my search experience – and more interested in engaging with the brand that made that possible.”
Quick-start guide to semantic analysis
While software tools can be used to expedite the semantic analysis process, Paxton asserts that it can also be done manually – though you’ll still need to use a word counter (here’s one for free) and some spreadsheet software.
Here’s how to do it:
Pull up the top 10 results on Google for a keyword you want to rank for.
Copy/paste all the words in the first result into a text editor or Word document. Count how often each word appears (you can exclude words like “the,” “and,” “but,” etc.) and how many words appear in total on that page.
Repeat the second step for the remaining pages.
See which terms are used in the highest concentrations – not just how often they’re used, but their percentage of the entire body of content. These are topics semantically related to your keyword term. Explore them for your content experience to be considered complete in the eyes of Google.
Now, run the same analysis on your brand’s body of content that would likely rank for that keyword and compare your results, looking for any terms that may be missing from your brand’s content conversations. Create content on those topics and your rankings should start to go up like clockwork.
Give Google no choice
Google wants to provide a good experience for users and needs great content to do that. Instead of planning your content around Google’s algorithmic expectations, use the power of search to find hidden opportunities to write for your audience in more personally resonant ways. Create content that’s so great Google has no choice but to rank it as a complete, unique, and highly desirable experience.
Feature Image Credit: Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Jodi Harris is the director of editorial content and strategy at Content Marketing Institute and serves as editor-in-chief of its digital magazine, Chief Content Officer. Follow her on Twitter at @Joderama.
Google will roll out an option in the coming weeks that allows users to opt out of having their Gmail, Chat, and Meet data used to offer “smart” features like Smart Compose and Smart Reply.
Gmail permissions are being featured by Google as the next privacy setting. Whatever the choice users make, “Google ads are not based on your personal data in Gmail, Maalika Manoharan, product manager at Google, wrote in a blog post.
Earlier this year, Google advertisers gained the option to buy Product Shopping ads and Showcase Shopping ads for Gmail campaigns in March. They are reported in the Google Display Network.
Standard Shopping campaigns will automatically run on Gmail, when marketers opt in to Gmail, Discover, and YouTube campaigns.
Manoharan explains that automated algorithms, not manual review, make it possible for Google to offer the new privacy feature. A toggle disables the background data processing that makes it possible to collect and use the data, Manoharan explained Monday.
Users remain in control of their data, whether they are an individual Gmail user or a Google Workspace administrator.
The new option will roll out in the coming weeks.
The Privacy Checkup tab allows users to control whether the data in Gmail, Meet, and Chat can offer smart features in the tabbed inbox for Smart Compose and Smart Reply in Gmail, as well as a reminder when bills are due in the Google Assistant and restaurant reservations in Google Maps.
Google’s engineers at the Google Safety Engineering Center in Europe developed the setting, which may have been based on the Global Protection Data Regulations (GDPR).
Auto-delete was introduced as the default to give consumers greater control of their data.
The ability to turn on and off some individual smart features is not new. The setting, which now gives users a choice whether or not the data can be used, is designed to reduce the work of understanding and managing that process.
As with all Google products, Gmail, Manoharan writes, Meet and Chat are secure-by-design to help protect consumer data and safeguard privacy.
The US government is preparing to make its case in courts over Google’s alleged anti-competitive practices, particularly on the Internet. While it may already have its arguments prepared, the Justice Department may still be considering what steps it will require Google to take, presuming it wins its case. One of those may be to split up the company, which is already just a subsidiary of the bigger Alphabet, which includes selling off the most-used web browser in the market, Chrome.
The DOJ’s upcoming antitrust lawsuit against Google really revolves more around its alleged monopoly and unfair advantage in digital advertising, a position recently echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. As part of its preparations, it has asked feedback from rivals and third-parties on what fixes have to be made to curb Google’s immense power. One such step would be to split it up and Chrome’s name came up as one of those properties outside of advertising that needed to go.
While not directly involved in Google’s advertising business, it’s hard to deny that Chrome contributes immensely to Google’s position and influence on the Web. As the most-used browser today, websites have to pretty much play by the rules Google imposes through Chrome features as well as through “industry-wide” campaigns and coalitions. This, in turn, helps Google push its own advertising platform forward as the reference implementation of how ads should behave.
That said, the DOJ’s case, which is expected to be formally filed within the next few weeks, won’t be an easy one, especially if state attorneys general feel the government is still unprepared for a legal battle with the tech giant. The court of popular opinion, at least among regulators and lawmakers, does seem to at least side with the general view of how Big Tech may have overstepped their boundaries.
Google will also face an uphill battle, especially if the proposal to sell off Chrome comes up. It could, however, argue how disrupting this part of its operations could prove destructive to the Web, considering how many businesses, apps, and services have been tied not just to the Chrome web browser but to Chrome OS as well as its open source Chromium base.
In a TEDx Talk, consultant David Mitroff explains when and why you can call yourself an expert.
Do you think of yourself as an expert in your industry? You may be more of one than you realize. In an engaging TEDx Talk, marketing consultant, Google mentor, and psychology PhD David Mitroff picks apart the question of what it takes to be an expert at something and when you should start saying that you are — because if you don’t, no one else will.
Mitroff began thinking about this after he gave a talk and two old men came up to him and said, “You’re really funny. You should be a standup comic.”
He wasn’t so sure, but he looked up the definition of a standup comic, and read that it was someone who interacts with the audience and is dynamic and fun. “I do that,” he thought. So he decided to put “standup comic” in his LinkedIn profile. After all, he figured, people who eat ice cream and post about it call themselves food bloggers, so why not?
The town where he’d met the old men asked him to return and give a second talk. On the basis of his previous talk and his LinkedIn profile, they promoted this new event calling him a consultant and standup comic. The presentation went well and the audience laughed. But an old friend of Mitroff’s called him up insisting that he couldn’t call himself a standup comic because he hadn’t performed at places like The Improv. Mitroff pointed out that if you Googled the name of the (small) town where he’d spoken and the term “standup comic,” results one through 10 were about him, on account of the promotion for his talk.
“So when are you an expert?” Mitroff asks. “Is it when others say you are? Is it when two old guys say you are or your friend says you’re not? Is it when you say you are?”
We all know the reasons for not calling ourselves an expert. There’s imposter syndrome, the feeling that your accomplishments are the result of luck and that you’re in constant danger of being exposed as a fraud. If you believe this, then claiming to be an expert only increases your danger of being called out as a fake.
More rationally, you may also be concerned about the Dunning-Kruger effect, a well-known and widespread phenomenon in which people believe themselves to be more expert than they are. “As you start learning something more and more, you realize you know less and less and less,” Mitroff says. “You’ve got to learn more and more skills about it.”
Mitroff is not suggesting that you should declare yourself an expert on fly-fishing, for instance, after one successful fishing trip. Instead, he says, if you want to become an expert at something, do these three things:
1. Spend three years learning your topic.
“After a lot of research, and a lot of time and pain, I believe it takes three years to become an expert,” he says. (He’s leaving aside fields where there’s a set certification path, for instance the four years of medical school followed by a residency required to become a physician.)
“Now does that mean you just wait three years and then say, ‘OK, I’m an expert now’? No, you actually have to do stuff,” he says. Begin by acquiring knowledge, and then keep on learning. “The research shows that experts continue to learn and educate themselves more and more and more, and they surround themselves with other people to become even more expert,” he says. “You don’t just become an expert and stop learning.”
Think about the smartest people you know. I’m willing to bet most of them do just this. Or think about some of the smartest and most iconic entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. They spend much of their time reading, studying, and talking to other experts to continue expanding their expertise. If, after decades of constant learning, these guys still don’t know everything they need to, chances are you won’t either.
2. Build your confidence.
Being an expert won’t do you much good if you never tell anyone about it. “You have to believe in yourself,” Mitroff says. “You have to believe in your product, or believe in your service. You have to believe in your community, and you have to believe in what you’re doing.”
If you’ve followed the first step and put in the time to learn your topic and practice your skills, then you’ve already gone at least some of the way to becoming an expert. Being an expert doesn’t mean that you’re never wrong, it doesn’t mean you know absolutely everything, and it doesn’t mean that other experts will always agree with you. It means you’ve put in the time and work to learn as much about your topic as you can, and that you’re continuing to learn more every day.
So if you’ve put in that time and you’ve learned a lot, own it! Declare yourself an expert. Don’t let naysayers like Mitroff’s friend get inside your head and shake that confidence.
3. Take action.
Your expertise will be of no use to anyone if all you do is sit around saying what an expert you are. So put your expertise to practical use.
As a marketing consultant, Mitroff made an astute observation: Most people who are nominated for awards don’t win them, but the mere fact of being nominated brings them visibility and prestige. Armed with that knowledge, he began nominating his clients and other people he knew for awards in their fields. “Why not?” he says. “They might accidentally win sometimes, but if they don’t win it doesn’t matter.”
Others began nominating Mitroff for awards in return, and he also began nominating himself. Along the way, he got nominated for an award as a changemaker in the city of Oakland, California, a nomination that made sense because, he says, he’s given free presentations to aspiring entrepreneurs and small-business owners at Oakland City Hall more than 60 times.
Did he win the award? No. But, he says, that nomination may have led directly to his being chosen for the very TEDx Talk he was now giving.
Groceries and cleaning supplies aren’t the only things Amazon is selling during the pandemic.
The e-commerce giant is peddling plenty of advertising space to companies hoping to give their items prime placement in front of Amazon’s legions of shoppers. The demand has kept Amazon’s ad sales strong amid Covid-19, even as its big tech competitors in digital advertising, Google and Facebook, suffer slowdowns.
Those two companies have dominated the online ad market, accounting for roughly 61% of digital ad spending by one estimate. But Amazon has been making inroads in recent years, and Covid-19 has pushed companies to devote more dollars to retail media, according to market research firm Forrester.
“Retail media—which, in its simplest form, refers to digital ad placements on eCommerce websites bought by consumer goods brands to influence the customer at the point of purchase—is booming during the pandemic,” the firm said in an Aug. 12 report. “In fact, Amazon’s advertising revenue didn’t miss a beat in Q2, growing at 41% year over year, while Facebook recorded its slowest ad revenue growth since going public and Google’s ad revenue declined for the first time ever.”
Amazon doesn’t report advertising revenue separately, but it does report “other” sales that it explains “primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to our other service offerings.” In the quarter ending June 30, those sales jumped to $4.2 billion, while Facebook’s and Google’s ad businesses struggled over the same period.
In its report, Forrester pointed to retail media benefiting from factors that include e-commerce adoption, the large budgets consumer packaged goods companies maintain for retail marketing, and the fact that more retailers are offering media platforms. CVS, for example, is said to be readying its own ad network, and Walgreens is testing digital displays on the doors of coolers in its stores.
Whether the shift of ad dollars toward retail continues may depend on how e-commerce fares as the pandemic plays out, and on advertisers’ willingness to move money out of Google and Facebook.
For now, at least, it’s another way that Amazon looks poised to emerge even stronger than before.
