Full Transcription
[Introduction] – 00:00
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 92 of the TWIMshow. This is your host, Sajid Islam. And today, I’ll be going over the notable news and updates from the digital marketing space from the week of January 17, 2022.
[Update 1 – Google Ads’ Updated Experiments Page] – 00:12
So today, first off, we’re going start with Google Ads. Google Ads has not released any new feature. It’s just that they revamped an existing feature which is the experiments page. Now if you run Google ads and if you haven’t heard of the experiments page, then you should definitely take a look at it. This is a very helpful tool within Google ads. What this experiments page does is that it helps you to answer these questions. What if I ran my campaigns as Automated bidding versus the manual bidding I’m doing right now, would I see a different results? So what you would do is you carve out experiments and then obviously you devise an experiment and then you would assign a dollar amount. So say you would say 80% of my budget will run on the current algorithm which is manual bidding. And then i want to divert 20% of my budget towards this experiment which is automatic bidding and i want to see the results. And when you do that, you can see the and you can decide if this experiment was successful or not. And then you would be able to say okay, fine, this was successful. Let me copy it over. So then where the new feature comes in is now with one click, you’d be able to copy over the experiment campaign into your active campaign. Right. Without having to redo everything. In the past it was a very manual work. So Google has just made it easier. Now i went into great details to cover this only because i want you to use experiments. If you’re working with an advertiser, Google ads advertiser or Google ads marketing person, you want to definitely ask them if they use experiments. If so, when and if the person says they have not heard of experiments and cannot explain to you what it is, that’s probably the advertiser market here you should not be working with. Okay, so that’s the key takeaway for this update.
[Update 2 – Google Search Console Now Includes Desktop Page Experience] – 02:07
With that, let’s move on to the next update. The next update is Google Search Console now includes desktop page experience score. Now this is something we have covered in the past quite a bit in the last year. What this is all about is first Google rolled out mobile page experiments. We covered it in the past TWIMshow. And now Google is rolling out desktop page experiment score. And what this basically allows the score it shows you is it measures or calculates the score from three different areas. One is what they call it LCP. Last Content Display, FID, First Input Time. The time it takes to input form/field or a keystroke into any of the form and cumulative layout score. Right. Like how good is your layout for search engine. Do you really should worry about these three scores? Absolutely, because this is going to affect your SEO. And if your score is really poor, then obviously you’re not going to show up on SEO. And if it’s good, obviously Google is going to show it. By the way, i think fid is… I made a mistake. FID is the First Input Delay. How long does it take for the page to render so that you can enter the first keystroke. Anyway? They also look at other aspects such as https security like do you have SSL turned on https and things like that. Do you have pop ups? Too many pop ups. Obviously that’s going to count against you pop ups, such as warning, hey, we are collecting cookies, those are permissible. And Google doesn’t count that against you because that’s required by law. And that’s something we have again covered in the past in our TWIMshows. And this is one of the reasons you want to listen to our podcast on a regular basis because we keep bringing you the things you should know to help you get traction in marketing. Anyway, coming back to this topic, so this is all you need to know. If you are not keeping an eye on the score or if you’re not using Google Search Console, this is a good time to use it because Google is going To start rolling out start using page experience score on desktop starting i think sometime in February. They haven’t given exact date and then they’re going to end it out in end of march. So you do have some bit of a time, but Get ahead of the ball and get things moving.
[Update 3 – Yoast Now Supports SEO on Shopify] – 04:42
Talking about SEO, there is one new development which is Yoast Yoast is basically SEO provider and they’re primarily in the WordPress space Where they’ve allowed you to kind of when you create a blog or a page, you have a Yoast plugin and it will tell you how good your scores are in terms of SEO point of view. Again, is this something you can do without Yoast? Absolutely. Yoast just makes it easy right there, like hints and forms and things that guides you and do it. So Yoast is now coming up with An app for people on Shopify. Again, this is something happening because if you’ve been following our podcast, you know how shop. Now, Google has partnered with Shopify being has partnered with Shopify. They’re taking your product page on Shopify into different search engine and used to just basically adding more stuff, adding capability into that whole offering. Is that now when you have a Shopify page, you can add the Yoast app on Shopify which is about $30 a month and it will tell you how good your page is from an SEO standpoint. Now, is Yoast 100% accurate? Absolutely not. And why that is because Yoast is not Google. Right? Yoast does what it thinks is what Google knows. Again, Google does publish a fair amount of information and you’re going to see that one of those information today towards the end of the show. But what i want to tell you is Yoast is not like shooting in the dark. They’ve been in the business for a while, they’ve gathered some good practices and they say this is what a page should have. These are the tags they should have. This is what you need to have and these are the attributes you need to have. This is what you need to do. So it guides you and helps you all those things that you’d probably not be able to get it done right on the gate if you didn’t have a hire an SEO person. So with that, that’s all about Yoast. So if you’re on Shopify or if you know someone on Shopify, make sure you tell them hey, there’s an app called Yoast that they can add on and help them surface on Google organically. Now at some point there’s only so many pages can show up on the first page. But that’s a discussion for another day.
[Update 4 – Why Site/SEO Migrations Are Hard] – 06:55
With that, let’s move on to the next update which is a great actually question Google’s John Mueller actually explain why SEO or site migrations are hard. Now what do i mean by that? Say we rank very highly for Google Ads experts and our site is marketandgrow.com. Tomorrow we decided, hey, We’re going to change our site to say from marketandgrow.com to say xyzdigital.com. And if we change it, obviously we are going to lose our site ranking, right? Or you would think we should not lose it because it’s the same site. We are moving from marketandgrove.com to xyzdigital.com. Why should we lose our search? Because we have already been ranked and we are already on first page of Google. Well Google’s John Mueller says that’s not as easy as you think it is because obviously they have indexes and each indexes that needs to be updated. So it takes time and sometimes it takes months to up to a year. John Mueller does go into indepth and says we have a site migration guide. By the way, this link is in the show notes page so you definitely want to check it out. He says there is a site migration guide, documentation should check it out but at a high level. He says there are four things you should monitor. One is first of all do your research right. Take account of all the old URLs and what the new URLs are going to be. Implement migrations. Probably you have to do some 301 redirects. You have to do internal redirects, internal updates and then monitor the migration and make sure everything is done. And then keep checking the Google Search Console and see that this is done. But overall the reason i’m covering is because a lot of people do migrate websites, migrate domains and they may be affected by this and this is something i learned something new. All the in details, stuff like there is a site migration guide documentation. And this has been there for since 2014. So it’s an eight year old documentation. And Google John Mueller says we are updating it. Okay. So now you know how to do a proper site migration. And obviously if you are doing it or you know someone doing it, refer them back to this episode of the podcast to this update. And then they can click the link and follow through the go down the rabbit hole with that.
[Update 5 – Google New robots tag: indexifembedded] – 09:17
The last update for this week is Google has released a new tag for the robots. And robots are basically the crawlers that come to your website in the middle of the night or sometime during the day and indexes reads your page and indexes your page. So the new tag is called ‘indexifembedded’ right? So what these robots tag? This is for you to use when you have embedded content on your page and you want Google to either index it or don’t want to index it because now you can say, why would i do an embed tag? I mean, there are multiple reasons. Like, for example, we take the TWIMshow podcast and we embed this podcast into our website. Right? It’s an index. And so we could use a tag like indexifembedded and say yes. So that way the crawler knows, hey, we want this page within the page to be indexed. Or we could say no sense, Don’t index it, leave it separate. So it’s totally giving you flexibility. And i see a lot of websites these days do embed a page within a page through the Use of iframe would they do that? Like, for example, if i want to put book a time link into our page and instead of having that user go from our website to a third party website, say Calendly, we could embed the page within our that page book now page. And we probably say, hey, you Don’t need to index this page. Or maybe you do want to index this page. It’s up to you. Like maybe you have a LinkedIn article that you want to embed into your page. Right? So there are multiple reasons why you may want to do it or you don’t want to do it, but that option is up to you to control right now without deciding whether this will get indexed or not.
[Closing] – 11:04
Ok, folks, so that’s it for this week folks. Now if you find value in this podcast, or if you think this was helpful, do me a favor. Give us a like, thumbs up, share with your friends. I could definitely, could use your help in getting this podcast to other people, bringing in more listeners. Again, I appreciate you listening. I know your time is valuable. With that, I’m signing off for this week, until next week. Take care bye-bye.
Thank you for tuning in this week, it was a pleasure to serve you all. Hit the subscribe button so that you remember to sign on next week. Same place, same time for another round of This Week In Marketing.
1. Google Ads’ Updated Experiments Page (00:12) – In the new Experiments pages, advertisers no longer have to create a separate campaign draft and changes made to the original campaign are automatically synced to the experiment as well.
This streamlined experiments workflow saves advertisers time by eliminating campaign draft creation. Similarly, the experiment sync feature is also a timesaver because advertisers may no longer have to manually copy changes over from their original campaigns, which can be particularly time-consuming when running multiple experiments simultaneously. And, the ability to apply the changes from an experiment to the base campaign with just one click also makes implementation easier.
2. Google Search Console Now Includes Desktop Page Experience (02:07) – Google Search Console has a new report dedicated to evaluating Page Experience criteria on the desktop versions of webpages. This report can help you prepare for the launch of the page experience algorithm update on desktop, which will begin rolling out in February and finish at the end of March.
The desktop report can be accessed from the Page Experience tab in Search Console, directly underneath the mobile report. It looks identical to the mobile report, with the exception of the Mobile Usability section.
About Page Experience On Desktop: Google has confirmed the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS, and their associated thresholds will apply for the desktop ranking. Other aspects of page experience signals, such as HTTPS security and the absence of intrusive interstitials, will remain the same as well.
3. Yoast Now Supports SEO on Shopify (04:42) – Like the WordPress version of the app, Shopify merchants can use it to optimize their products and posts to show organic, non-shopping results. Yoast SEO for Shopify costs $29 per 30 days, unlike the WordPress version of the app, which operates under a freemium model.
Yoast SEO is one of the most commonly used SEO apps in the WordPress ecosystem and the launch of an app for Shopify speaks to the rise of e-commerce (particularly over the last two years).
4. Why Site/SEO Migrations Are Hard (06:55) – John Mueller from Google explained that URL changes are not simple for search engines to deal with because Google stores in its index a set of URLs, its on a URL or page by page basis. John said, “this may at first sound like a small change within a website.” He said, however “it’s not that simple for search engines.” Why? John explained that “search engines like Google store their index on a per-page basis.” “So if you change the address or the URL of a page that page’s data has to be forwarded somehow otherwise it gets lost,” he explained.
First, John recommends you deeply study the Google site move documentation, it was vastly improved in 2014 and updated since then over time. John then summarized what you should do, but it is important to see all those details in the help docs:
- Do your research
- Create a list of the old & new URLs
- Implement the migration
- 301 redirects
- Internal updates
- Monitor the migration
And he said these changes can take Google several months to process with the more important URLs happening faster and the less important URLs happening slower. Google has said most of the time these moves take a few months but again, John reminded us to keep the redirects in place for at least a year.
5. Google New robots tag: indexifembedded (09:17) – Google has a new robots tag for when you use embedded content on your pages named indexifembedded. Google said with this new tag “you can tell Google you’d still like your content indexed when it’s embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.”
If you embed content on your site and want to control indexing of the content on the page, now you have more control with this new indexifembedded robots tag.
Google explained that sometimes publishers want the content on the page to be indexed and sometimes not when they embed content. This new robots tag gives you more control over communicating those wishes to Google Search.
